Against All Odds
by Mai Kusakabe
Summary: He would have discarded the bounty poster as just that of another rookie, but then he read those three words.


I had this idea when I first read Law's past, but I hadn't written it until now.

Be warned that this has some serious spoilers about said past, in case you haven't read it.

This story has been beta read by The Red Harlequin On The Luna :)

* * *

**Against All Odds**

Sengoku stares at the wanted poster in his hands, brows set in a deep frown. By all purposes, he should have put it in the same pile as countless other ones and updated bounties went, the one someone took away every week because it didn't warrant any more attention past the cursory read over he gave every new bounty poster.

This one was just another rookie from North Blue, with a decent bounty for it being his first one but not nearly as high as, say, the red haired kid from South Blue that entered the government's radar a couple of weeks ago.

However, three words had been enough to capture the fleet admiral's attention.

Ope Ope Fruit.

They had lost track of the fruit after the disastrous operation to put a stop to the Donquixote Family that had resulted in Rosinante's death. They had feared, for a while, that Doflamingo had it, but they discarded the notion when no proof supporting it appeared.

And now it showed up, over ten years later, in the hands of an unknown kid from North Blue. Only the sea it was in made sense.

Hoping to figure the mystery out, Sengoku moved on to the background report that had come with it. The report was thin, much thinner than average, and the marine's frown only deepened when he opened it to the first page.

No confirmed information.

Sengoku's mind jumped to the last time they hadn't been able to find information on someone: by the time they had figured out who Portgas D. Ace really was, the brat had already been under Whitebeard's protection.

He flipped to the second page, where the explanation of why there was no information was given. As usual, it was a long winded apology that could have been summarized in two lines. Basically, they hadn't been able to find any Trafalgar Law, or anybody matching the description that could be using that name. Or, more accurately, they _had _found a Trafalgar Law, but had discarded him on the grounds of being dead.

A boy of around the same age as their pirate had been born, almost twenty four years ago, in Flevance. Left to die on his own, he wouldn't have reached the age of fifteen, but he had died at ten when the entire city was razed to the ground. Opposite to what had happened in Ohara, no one had escaped, no one had been even suspected of escaping, though due to the nature of the deaths many bodies had never been found.

Sengoku's eyes slid back to the smirking young man on the wanted poster.

An incident from years ago came to mind. He hadn't paid much attention to it at the time, busy as he had been with the amount of pirates around, but he remembered rumors of a 'white monster' going to hospitals in North Blue.

He picked the den den mushi on his desk and asked for the report on the incident.

It would be best to see how that had gone before speculating anymore.

* * *

When later that week an officer came to collect the already revised bounty posters, Trafalgar Law's wasn't amongst them. Instead, the rookie pirate's poster was in the second drawer of Sengoku's desk, where he kept a few select bounties, those of the people whose careers he monitored.

He didn't tell anyone about the boy, because explaining how he had reached the conclusion that Trafalgar Law was indeed the boy from Flevance that was supposed to have died almost fourteen years ago would mean he had to reveal that, before his death, Rosinante had betrayed the marines, jeopardized a very important operation and stolen one of the most valued devil fruits in the world.

Not for the first time since he made the discovery, Sengoku wondered if Rosinante had known he had succeeded before he died.

Grabbing a mission report more forcefully than was necessary, Sengoku decided to concentrate on his work, aware that no amount of thinking would solve anything in this case.

For the first time, he could understand a little the position Garp was in when it came to his family's criminal activities.

* * *

This is basically a theory of mine turned one-shot. I'm really curious to know if Sengoku has related Law to Cora-san.

What did you think? :)


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